


thirteen ways of looking at a banana

by surgicalstainless



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Bananas, Bucky needs a hug, Choice paralysis, M/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Pre-Slash, References to Canon-Typical Violence, References to canon medical experimentation, Slight CA:TWS spoilers for the post-credits scene only
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-29
Updated: 2014-04-29
Packaged: 2018-01-21 05:39:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,324
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1539650
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/surgicalstainless/pseuds/surgicalstainless
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Time flies like an arrow.<br/>Fruit flies like a banana."<br/>— Marx</p>
            </blockquote>





	thirteen ways of looking at a banana

**Author's Note:**

  * For [gyzym](https://archiveofourown.org/users/gyzym/gifts).



> Inspired by [this post](http://gyzym.tumblr.com/post/83124313687/six-fanfictions-i-am-currently-craving-the#notes) from gyzym about the tragedy of the [banana plague](http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2008-06/can-fruit-be-saved),
> 
> and by Wallace Stevens' poem ["Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird."](http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/174503)
> 
> Because I couldn't not.

**I**

The Winter Soldier had a hell of an arm.

There was a heavy silence in the kitchen, a pregnant pause as they all watched the (now badly deformed) banana sliding slowly down the window glass.

Tony let out a long, low whistle. 

"We should start a softball team. Can you hit, too? Stupid question, of course you can hit. Jerseys with long sleeves, we'll all wear hats, this will be great. You think 'Avengers' is too obvious as a team name? Probably. You're right, we can brainstorm later. What, exactly, was wrong with my banana?"

"That," Bucky ground out, "was not a banana."

At Bucky's words, Steve's worried expression cleared. He turned to stare at Bucky with wide eyes.

"You, too? Oh, thank God. I'd started to think I was going crazy."

Tony crossed to the window, hands in his pockets, and inspected the damaged fruit from extreme close range. He sniffed it, then took a delicate lick.

"Definitely a banana. A _perfect_ banana, I might add, just the right amount of green. It was supposed to go in my smoothie, and now it is but a smear of wasted potential on my window. Why is that?"

Bucky didn't have the words for a more complicated explanation.

"Not. A. Banana."

Tony looked at the two of them and drew breath to speak, but Steve got there first.

"No, he's right." Steve looked apologetic. "Tony, there's something wrong with your bananas."

_"What?"_

"All the bananas! They don't taste right. They're not sweet like they should be, and the texture is weird, and the color is wrong. I didn't want to say anything, because you didn't seem to notice, but..."

Bucky found a word.

"Bland."

"Yes! Exactly! It's just, everything is different now, and to find you've gone and ruined the bananas, too..."

Bucky curled in on himself further, and Steve laid a hand on his good shoulder, gave a slight squeeze. 

Tony had found a second banana. He used it to make a sweeping gesture of negation —

"Actually, sir," JARVIS broke in, "the Sergeant and the Captain are most likely referring to the Gros Michel banana, which was the variety commercially available during their youth. A fungal blight in the fifties rendered it all but extinct, and the current variety, Cavendish, was introduced to replace it. My sources agree that the Cavendish is a most inferior substitute."

Tony opened and closed his mouth a few times. Steve nodded to himself in vindication, and Bucky loosened from his defensive hunch a little. 

"Well. More bananas for me. Can you try not to take out your anger on the fruit, Seven of Nine?"

Bucky didn't know what the numbers meant, but Tony was looking at him, so he shrugged. 

"JARVIS, make a note: the windows are now tested bullet-proof, Thor-proof _and_ Super Soldier in a fit of pique proof. Well, with fruit, anyway. We need more data. So, _all but_ extinct, you said?"

Tony wandered out, still chattering to JARVIS, banana in hand and half-made smoothie forgotten on the breakfast bar. Steve tasted it and made a face.

"What do you want for breakfast, Buck?"

Bucky didn't know.

___

**II**

The Winter Soldier killed a man in a banana plantation once. Some little politician in some little republic; it didn't matter. 

"Make it petty. Make it look like a little local argument gone wrong," his handlers had told him, and it did not get any more petty than this. Blood fountained against fronds, soft as the night breeze, little drops of it black on the blade of the rusted machete. The Soldier dropped the body over the nearest stem of bananas. Spiders scuttled from between the green fruit, avoiding the sweet, slow drip of blood.

___

**III**

It never, _never_ seemed to stop raining in this part of France. They were dug in, deep in a muddy trench in a forest in a region where Allied soldiers were not supposed to be. This meant fires were out of the question, and they were traveling much too light and fast for anything so luxurious as a tent. Cold water dripped off Bucky's helmet and ran unceasing down the back of his neck. It cascaded in little waterfalls over the lip of their mudhole, and beaded up like dull jewels on the star on Steve's shield. 

Steve was finishing up dinner, if you could call it that. It hadn't been enough. Even back in camp, with a mess tent and plenty of chow, Steve didn't want to take more than his share, and his share was never enough. Bucky had known Steve long enough to know what hungry looked like on him, even if the new muscles wouldn't shrink or tire.

(Bucky was hungry too, hungry all the time now, ever since Zola got his hands on him. He was scared, scared enough that he could call the gnawing in his belly _fear_ and try to forget it. He didn't tell Steve.)

Bucky flicked some rain out of his eyes and flashed Steve an easy smile. 

"I got banana candy in my ration can. I hate banana flavor. You want 'em?"

They both knew it for a lie, of course, but Steve's big hand closed over the offered box, a brief warmth on Bucky's outstretched fingers.

___

**IV**

When the Winter Soldier made the safehouse at last, there was someone already there. It was a woman, slender and graceful, and she was sitting on the windowsill, gazing out at the snow. The sinking sun set her hair aglow, a shining red halo that did not, for once, put the Soldier in mind of blood. He did not know the woman, he was sure, but in this moment she did not seem to him a threat.

The Soldier stood in the doorway for a moment, pistol in hand, and ignored the warmth running over his fingers, down the barrel, onto the floor. Something about the tableau — the figure on the windowsill, the spotted bananas in the cracked green bowl, that certain slant of light —

It was gone. The redhead turned to look at him, raised one eyebrow. 

" _James_ ," she said, with something that was not quite a smile.

___

**V**

Mrs Rogers was slicing bananas over oatmeal in the watery morning light by the window. She was thin, like her son, and fever-bright, like her son, and she always had a welcoming smile and a place at the table for Bucky, no matter what was going on at home. Like her son. 

She placed the bowls before both boys, sweet hot oatmeal topped with sunny yellow circles, and laid a hand, briefly, on Bucky's shoulder. 

“Eat up,” she told them, and Steve met Bucky's eyes with a smile as he lifted his spoon.

___

**VI**

If he were permitted preferences, the Winter Soldier would prefer to avoid missions like this. The table setting was beautiful, probably, elegant and expensive, but the Soldier only saw that everything on it could be made into a weapon. China, crystal and silver became stiletto or blade; carved chairs turned to blunt instruments; the fine linen tablecloth would make a crisp white garotte; poison in the tea or on the _pain au chocolat_ ; a banana was the ideal texture for cramming down a throat to stop an airway. He tweaked the flowers (foxglove, oleander) in their heavy leaded vase and lit the candles, watched them flicker and flare.

He held the chair for the old woman, when she came in, and she did not spare him a glance. She did not notice him as he poured her tea or settled her napkin. When he slid his metal hand into her hair, though, fisted it lightly at the base of her skull — _then_ she looked at him, with a soft gasp and her eyes growing wide. 

He gave her a small smile, a charming relic from some long-ago life, and brought his flesh-and-blood hand up to cradle her jaw. If you had looked, then, and not known, it would have seemed a caress, a moment of tenderness. In all the wide and pitted wasteland of his memory, the Soldier did not think he had ever been touched like that. 

A few seconds more, then, of his palm gentle on her face. A quick twist, a small crunch. The Soldier set the Target down carefully, head on the plate, silver hair curling over yellow banana. He let himself out, locked the door behind him, warmth rapidly cooling from his palm.

___

**VII**

When Bucky got back from the Draft Board, he found Steve perched on their one windowsill, sketching. The sill was narrow — Bucky could never have balanced there — but Steve seemed to fit okay. The light streaming through caught his hair in a fine gold halo, and for a moment Bucky could see exactly why Steve was always going on about light: Steve looked beautiful like this.

He was sketching a still life, though it wasn't much of one, just a bunch of on-the-turn bananas in a chipped blue bowl. He was intent, though, and he didn't look up right away as Bucky came in the door. Keys in hand, Bucky hoarded the moment, all the golden things that would soon be gone.

___

**VIII**

They experimented on the Winter Soldier, of course. New drugs, different techniques, program after algorithm after regimen. Always something to try, always men in the corner with their clipboards.

This new drug was red; the color caught the Soldier's eye as it flashed in the harsh light, a shade that seemed —  


But when they injected it, his mouth was flooded with the taste of bananas, ester-sharp across his tongue. The flavor bloomed there, incongruous, as they turned up the electricity and the world burned away in ice-blue bolts of pain.

___

**IX**

Steve could juggle; that was new.

They were in a bar in London, all the Commandos. Morita was drinking like it was his mission, Falsworth was playing a bawdy song on the piano, and Gabe Jones was trying (and failing) to sweet-talk a local dame. As for the others, well, Steve knew better than to play Bucky at darts, but the others didn't. Yet.

Steve must have been bored, because he idly grabbed a handful of balls from the pool table and started tossing them around. 

The sight made Bucky miss his shot.

"Since when can you juggle?"

Steve gave him a lopsided smile. 

"One of the girls taught me on tour. My coordination's a lot better these days."

"You don't say." Bucky picked up the nearest thing to hand — an empty shot glass— and tossed it. Steve added the glass to the rotation without missing a beat.

It turned into a game. Commandos would find things to throw at Steve, who would add them to the mix. Soon a lady's compact, a set of keys and a boiled egg were also rising and falling in hypnotic loops. The girl behind the bar even came up with a bowl of fruit. Fresh stuff was strictly rationed, of course, but they were all a little liquored by then, so one by one Bucky lofted an orange, two apples and three bananas Steve's way. The man's hands were a blur, but nothing ever hit the ground. 

When they ran out of stuff to throw at the Captain, Bucky spent some minutes trying to get a dart into each of the bananas as they floated over the top of the arc. There was frantic wagering going on behind him (will he hit one, what will Cap drop first, ten says he never drops any), but Steve just sent him a shit-eating grin and sped up his hands.

___

**X**

The museum exhibit said Barnes was from Brooklyn, so that's where the Winter Soldier went. Things were starting to tug at his mind, little flashes of sound and color too fleeting, too fragmented to follow. The Soldier wanted —  


The Soldier did not _want_. The Soldier obeyed; but where there had once been orders there was now emptiness, and demons were beginning to crowd in from the dark.

So the Soldier went to Brooklyn, and it did not help him. Nothing seemed familiar. The streets were crowded and careless, the alleys just as filthy as alleys anywhere. The Soldier sat in a disused doorway, just for a moment, just to get his bearings, just to find any kind of direction at all.

"Hey there. Are you okay?"

_Threat analysis:_

A young woman was speaking to him, crouched down to his level several feet ( _not a safe distance, never a safe distance, but out of immediate reach_ ) away. She had blonde hair, and she wore an orange dress with a white apron and a wavering smile ( _not immediately hostile_ ). She held a paper bag in one hand ( _lightweight, unlikely to be concealing a weapon_ ) and a cardboard cup in the other.

"You've been sitting here a while. I thought, maybe you'd like a cup of coffee? And, we had some day-old muffins, too. If you're hungry. They were just going to be thrown out."

She crept forward a little, set the cup and the bag on the ground between them. The cup steamed from a hole in its lid.

The Soldier did not move. He was tense, his whole body aching for something so simple as a fight, but the woman was smiling at him again, both her hands in plain view. 

"Banana nut. Do you want them?"

He didn't know. 

He was hungry, though. The Solider reached out with his right hand, unfurled the top of the bag just enough to see inside without otherwise disturbing it. There were muffins inside, two of them, each bigger than his clenched fist. The scent of bananas rose from the bag, a little off somehow, but nothing that warned him of explosive or poison. He tugged the bag closer; nothing bad happened. 

The woman straightened, smiled once more, and turned toward the café across the street. She was halfway there before the Soldier found the word he was looking for.

"Thanks." 

His voice was rough from disuse, and he could not be sure she heard, but her step had a little extra bounce as she disappeared through the café door. Steam curled around his fingers, still resting over two banana muffins in a brown paper bag.

___

**XI**

"It certainly is possible to have too much of a good thing, Tony."

Dr. Banner's soft voice carried the length of the small shop with ease, and cut Stark off mid-sentence.

They were in a Baskin-Robbins, and Dr. Banner was teaching the others about choice paralysis.

"Too many choices can be overwhelming for anyone," he went on, "but if you've never been allowed to choose _anything_ before in your life —"

They were in a Baskin-Robbins, and ~~the Soldier~~ ~~Sergeant Barnes~~ Bucky was crouched in the most defensible corner, furthest from the door, hair hanging over his eyes.

"Choice is good, of course; it's important to let people choose, but it might be better to start with fewer options."

They were in a Baskin-Robbins, and Stark had been minutes into a monologue about the proper construction of banana splits, and the wonder of chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream, and his plan to buy a pint of every flavor.

(Was salmonella not something you had to worry about in the future?)

"What was Bucky's favorite flavor when you were kids?"

Steve's response was immediate. 

"Bucky, do you want strawberry, or chocolate?"

Bucky had a sudden image (memory? Dream? Wish? He couldn't tell) of Steve, small Steve, smiling at him over a rare shared strawberry cone. His lips were cold and pink and sticky and sweet with the confection, and Bucky wanted, he _wanted_ —

"Chocolate." His voice sounded like gravel and blood, it did not fit in here in this bright ice cream shop full of primary colors, and he hunched a little further into his corner and traced the edges of a boot knife with the fingers of his good hand.

Steve appeared, just visible through the curtain of hair, and handed him a single scoop of chocolate ice cream in a waffle cone. He slid down the wall to sit beside Bucky on the floor, careful not to cut off Bucky's exit routes, and began to eat his own strawberry cone. 

They were in a Baskin-Robbins, and the ice cream was pretty good.

___

**XII**

The day that Bucky met Steve, in the middle of a brawl in the alley behind the drugstore, Bucky was already boasting a shiner of his own.

He waded into the heap of boys and grabbed the little one on the bottom, hauled him to safety. An elbow or something clipped his bad eye on the way out, and the pain made him dizzy, snappish when he shook the narrow shoulder he held.

"Don't you know enough to run away when they pick on you?"

"I started it," the kid told him proudly, and grinned up at him all gap-toothed and bloody. "They were giving some poor alleycat a hard time."

"And you offered to cut in? What kind of idiot are you?"

"I'm Steve," was the simple reply. "I don't like bullies."

Bucky sighed. "Yeah, me neither."

"Is that how you got that black eye?"

The eye, in truth, was fading now, not so much black as a sickly yellow-brown.

"Nah, slipped on a banana peel." He meant to give a wink, but his eye was still swollen, and it came out more like a leer. Steve laughed. The sound pierced Bucky, struck him somewhere deep and lonely. He discovered he wanted to hear that sound again.

"Hey," he said, still gripping Steve's shoulder as he did some quick calculations. Today was pay day, the bars wouldn't close for hours yet, it should be safe to — "Why don't you come home with me, my ma will patch you up."

"If you're sure," Steve began, but Bucky was already turning them to face the street. 

"Come on. I'm James Buchanan Barnes, but everyone calls me Bucky."

___

**XIII**

When Steve and Bucky got back from their morning run, there was a crate on the kitchen counter.

It was battered, and not very large. There was writing on it, something stamped in Malay, but the ink had blurred on the cheap wood. Bucky took one look and backed to a safe distance, took shelter behind the bulk of the kitchen island. He had few, too few, weapons hidden in his running gear, and nothing much else within easy reach. He turned to check on Steve —

But Steve was at the counter, always trusting, pulling the lid off the box.

The first thing to hit him was the smell. The scent was unmistakable, sweet and rich and assertive. Bucky straightened from his crouch, slowly. Now he could see that the box's contents were so bright yellow they seemed to glow. Bananas, bunches of them, packed in straw. 

Steve ran a reverent hand over the fruit. When he looked over at Bucky, his smile was a combination of awe and delight. It hurt, the sight of it, tugged somewhere in Bucky dark and lonely. He sank down to the floor, leaned against the island and just breathed, his nose full of the old familiar scent of ripe bananas.

A minute went by, maybe, and then Steve came around to join him, his arm pressing a long line of damp warmth against Bucky's good arm. Bucky didn't flinch; he was getting used to it, Steve always at his side. He stared out the window at the city, but he didn't see anything at all.

"Hey, Buck," Steve said. "Want a banana?"

He was so _close_ , just inches away, with two golden bananas cradled in one big hand and his mouth quirked in that lopsided smile. Bucky wanted —

The words were getting easier.

"Yeah," he said, "I do."

**Author's Note:**

> You are heartily encouraged to come visit me on [tumblr](http://z-delenda-est.tumblr.com). I have no idea what I'm doing, but more friends are always better. And I really like prompts.
> 
> ____
> 
> I am exceedingly embarrassed to announce that there is now a [+1 to this piece](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1584632), because I thought Bucky should get what he wanted, for once. Horrible fluff. You have been warned.
> 
> ____
> 
>  **ETA:** For any who are interested, my recent fic ["asked and answered"](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2803400) loosely fits within this 'verse. It's about marriage proposals. It's much less sad.


End file.
